—-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, referring to the murder of two young Israelis by a man who screamed “Free Palestine” in Washington, D.C.
The context of that quote, from Netenyahu’s remarks last week: Continue reading
Prolific and historically literate EA commenter Steve-O-in NJ has been uncharacteristically scarce around these parts of late, but when he does weighed-in the quality of his commentary remains stellar. I’m going to have his Comment of the Day on the post “The Sequel to “Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?”— Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod” kick off what bids fair to end up as “Why the Democratic Party Has Disqualified Itself From National Leadership” Monday.
Every single Democrat who runs for office should be confronted with the fact that their party spent four years defiling the Constitution and ignoring the will of their own voters. They should be asked, again and again, how do you dare associate yourself with a party that would do this? What’s your excuse? Why should any voter trust anyone who runs as a Democrat now? What does your party stand for, if it would exploit a man it chose to have the most challenging leadership responsibilities in the world knowing he wasn’t mentally able to do the job, as a means of letting backroom, unelected ideologues and partisan hacks secretly chart U.S. policy? Every Democrat office-holder or candidate should be forced to either condemn his or her party or beg for forgiveness and a second chance.
And the public’s response to their entreaties should be the same as mine: “Never!”
Here’s Steve-O…
***
There’s no way I can be other than disgusted by this manipulative tactic by the same party who regularly bashed Reagan for being a senile old man while in office and came up with at least 20 ways to attack Trump as unfit. Reagan stumbled twice in eight years, once after being shot and having major surgery, again after seven years in office plus that and according to the left he was unfit the entire time, despite no one from the White House staff and no personal or government physician coming forward to verify any allegation of senility. No one unbiased has come forward to say Trump is unfit. His biased niece doesn’t count, and neither do disgruntled former employees. Former vice president Pence, former ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all have nothing to lose by spilling now, and every reason to do it after being publicly shut out of this administration, but none of them have.
Yet we all watched Biden deteriorate before our eyes, to the point where he could barely walk and couldn’t answer even softball questions, and the left tried to gaslight this nation by saying it was all Republican dirty tricks. This, the party of Dick Tuck, the original political dirty tricks man, whose members regularly insult the GOP as being a party made up of idiots and morons, had the audacity to accuse the same party of being masters of dirty tricks. This, the media who parlayed a single stumble, a golf swing, and a tennis serve gone wrong into a lasting image of Gerald Ford as an oaf and a klutz who couldn’t do anything right, had the audacity to bury multiple stumbles, an obvious old-guy shuffle, multiple obvious needs to be shown where to walk after initially going the wrong way, inability to answer easy questions, and a hundred other obvious signs of deterioration and THEN accuse those who pointed them out of trying to lie and deceive. If Biden hadn’t finally fallen apart in full view of the entire nation to the point where no farther denial was possible, these people would still be lying to us about Biden being sharp as a tack and having more energy than someone half his age.
The topic is abortion.
This is discouraging, if not unexpected. After all, “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Appiah, works for the New York Times, Where Ethics Go To Die. Nonetheless, the clueless certitude of his latest column is as offensive as it is indefensible for someone in the ethics field.
An inquirer asked The Ethicist “Does My Spouse Get a Say in Whether to Carry an Unplanned Pregnancy?” That framing alone was foreshadowing for what was to come; notice that the issue is a “pregnancy” and whether it is wanted. and not the snuffing out of a nascent human life, which is where this ethical conflict becomes difficult to resolve.
This time, I’m going to do running commentary on both “Name Withheld’s” query and Prof. Appiah’s answer. First, the question:
“I’m 46, unexpectedly pregnant despite having entered perimenopause, with three children already (the youngest is 4).” COMMENT: And your age and the number of children you have affects the right of an innocent life to continue how?
“My husband calls this a “disaster,” and believes abortion is the clear choice because we didn’t want another child or plan on this pregnancy.” COMMENT: Ending a human life is only a “clear choice” for psychopaths.
That’s what this unholy mess of a high school play ethics train wreck would be called if it were an old “Perry Mason” episode.
The run of a student production of “The Crucible” at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge Georgia was cut from two performances to one for reasons unknown. Understandably, the students and their parents were upset. The administration explained that the reason was a licensing agreement violation, and the school was afraid of having to pay damages, or something. It said in a statement,
“After Friday night’s performance of “The Crucible,” we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”
Ah, but woke theater Fury Howard Sherman, the same guy who thinks that it’s okay for actors to boycott performances they are contractually obligated to perform because they don’t like the political views of particular audience members (like, say, the President of the United States), is muckraking again. He writes on his website that he’s sure that the show was really cancelled because “the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.” See, somebody’s mother told a student that the principle had said “that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting” so the final performance was cancelled.
Does Sherman produce any evidence that isn’t double hearsay that such a sequence occurred? Nope. Do we hear a quote or see a message from the alleged illiterate lunatic who registered such a complaint? No again. But never mind: Sherman is a progressive (to be fair, most theater types are progressives…welcome to my world) with an agenda.
Axis hack #1…
Ezra Klein!
Axis hack #2…
Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!
Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.
Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.
Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.
I mean, other than “disgusting?”
From “Real Clear Politics”: Ethics Villain Jake Tapper hosts Lying Racist Van Jones and Obama Propagandist David Axelrod on CNN in a discussion of the “shocking” revelations regarding how Joe Biden was a walking vegetable while he was supposedly the “sharp as a tack” President of the United States….
TAPPER: Van, I remember how emotional you were in the immediate moments after the June 27, 2024, debate because of what you saw on the stage. And with all this new reporting coming out — and I should disclose that I gave both of you copies of the book so you would have a little bit more information. Do you feel like you were duped, Van? Like, how do you feel?
JONES: First, this book is extraordinary. I don’t care who you are, left, right, or otherwise. Anybody who cares about this country and about just the dynamics of power, this is “the emperor’s new clothes” playing itself out in real time. Everybody knew, but everyone was afraid to say — except for David Axelrod, for two years — that something was wrong here. I was shocked. I love Joe Biden. I don’t like him. I love him. I got a chance to work with him when I was a part of the Obama administration and loved him more every day. I was shocked to see his condition when he came out. And so was the world. And that wasn’t the first time he was in that condition. The book makes it very, very clear. There are people who knew and said nothing. And that is a crime against this republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.
Here, let me fix that for you, asshole: “….for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up” in which all of us were complicit. I’m sure that’s what you meant to say, you shameless totalitarian hack.
Conservative pundit Stephen Green adds, “Biden’s decline was obvious in 2020 — for those with eyes — and yet Democrat insiders still thought that Biden was better than any of the alternatives in 2020.” And I’ll add to that: last February I wrote, regarding President Trump’s attendance at the (yecchh) Super Bowl,
Yes, it is I.
My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.
But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.
A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.
Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.
Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.
Meanwhile,
—–Marci Shore,Timothy Snyder and in the NYT Op-Ed, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”
I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate response to this pathetic appeal to dubious authority is best answered with my traditional, “Good!” or a more vulgar response, like, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” That first paragraph in the Times piece certainly shows their expertise: Goebbels could hardly have done any better at misinformation and deceit.
Exactly ONE “legal resident” has been sent to a “foreign prison,” the “Maryland father” who was an illegal immigrant and who had received a lot of “due process.” The “foreign prison” he was sent to was not foreign to him, since it is the only country of which he’s a legal citizen. No students have been “detained” for “expressing their opinions.” No Federal judges have been “threatened with impeachment” either, as any of the judges exceeding their authority to issue dubious injunctions against legitimate Presidential actions should be able to explain. Anyone, even the President, saying “those judges should be impeached” or even “I’d like to impeach those justices” is simply expressing an opinion, not making a “true threat.” Judges can’t be impeached for incompetence or even misjudging their own power. The “threat” might as well have been “I would turn them into toads if I could!” Oooh. Scary.
This is a TikTok video that is now unavailable on that platform for some reason—maybe the Chinese don’t want the truth getting out there. The video is long, and the distraught teacher is obviously not a video pro, but her message is heartfelt as well as astute. Attention should be paid.
I stumbled on Hannah’s lament as I was preparing to write another post that it quickly subsumed. That one was a response to this [Gift link!] in which a Hollywood screenwriter blames the public for the fact that Hollywood movies stink now. “The true problem lies with you, the audience,” he writes. “[I]t’s hard to argue that Hollywood is doing anything other than giving you, the moviegoing public, what you want.” I was going to call my response, “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” and point out that Hollywood is as much responsible for the culture as it is now a victim of it.
Hollywood helped create the attention deficit-afflicted, literature starved, culturally illiterate generations that drive politics and commerce now. As Hannah’s video makes clear, there are a lot of factors that have created an American public that is unable to absorb complex issues or enjoy stories that will teach them something valuable about life and humanity. Hollywood and the entertainment industry are as culpable as any of them.
Ethics Alarms 